SALEM — The House of the Seven Gables hosted an event Sunday in celebration of women’s history in the city.
At the event, a local historian gave a talk on what life was like for the female occupants of the House of the Seven Gables throughout the centuries, and how it intertwined with local and national history.
House of the Seven Gables board member Robin Woodman presented a virtual lecture, entitled “The Women of the House of the Seven Gables and their Community.” Woodman’s lecture focused on the Turner and Ingersoll women, who occupied the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion until it was turned into a museum by a local philanthropist Caroline Emmerton.
The women of the families who owned the House of the Seven Gables during the “dawn of democracy,” as Woodman put it, were remarkable in their own individual ways. Living during wartime, the women of the estates exhibited the best traits of the Puritans who crossed the stormy Atlantic Ocean generations earlier in “the unforgiving sea voyage, not knowing what conditions lay ahead on the opposite side of the shore,” said Woodman.
The most common traits of the Puritans that the women of the House of the Seven Gables had, according to Woodman, were nonconformity and willfulness. They also tended to have fractions and, as most oppressed people do, defined themselves by what offended them.
And the strongest example of such a strong, opinionated, and nonconforming lady was Susanna Ingersoll (1785-1858), who was one of the last women to own the house, spending her entire life there as a single woman.
Ingersoll, who inherited the house after the tragic death of her mother in 1811, faced fierce opposition from her uncle, John Hathorne, who claimed the house as the oldest male in the family. Ingersoll later managed to purchase 62 properties, which made her the wealthiest landed woman in New England in an era when women rarely entered the business world.
After inheriting the mansion at 26, just months before President James Madison declared a war on England in 1812, Ingersoll started to buy many of the town’s properties, assisting others who decided to flee.
The previous female inhabitants of the house were no less strong, as they were coping not only with the feelings of loneliness and anxiety while their husbands were at war or on business, but also resisting violent attacks to survive in their new world and to save their children.
The first lady of the mansion, Elizabeth Roberts Turner, had to stay at home alone with two children while pregnant, while her husband John Turner was at King Philip’s War. His wife managed to keep the house and the children safe, and she later gave birth to two other children, one of whom was born five days after his father’s death.
Contrary to the customs of her times, the widow Turner didn’t remarry for the next five years, and she clearly showed a sharp mind and an acute business sense, according to Woodman, in preserving the cost of the mansion after the death of her husband.
Mary Kitchen Turner, the second lady of the House of the Seven Gables, stayed at the mansion alone to give birth to a daughter less than a year after the death of her firstborn, while her husband John Turner II was away to capture a notorious pirate. All of them were examples of strong women, Woodman said.
Woodman is a local historian who grew up in Salem and attended afterschool programs at the city’s Gables Settlement Association. After graduating from Lesley University, she went to Harvard University for her master’s degree.
